"Literary echoes, puns, paragrams, and mini-narratives collide so as to create the image of a world bursting with memories and overflowing with possibilities--a world like no one else's."
--Marjorie Perloff
Men duly understand the river of life,
misconstruing it, as it widens and its cities grow
dark and denser, always farther away.
And of course that remote denseness suits
us, as lambs and clover might have
if things had been built to order differently.
But since I don't understand myself, only segments
of myself that misunderstand each other, there's no
reason for you to want to, no way you could
even if we both wanted it. Do those towers even exist?
We must look at it that way, along those lines
so the thought can erect itself, like plywood battlements.
Angels (you
know who you are), come back
when you've aged a little, when the outdoors
is an attractive curiosity no longer.
Don't get me wrong, I like your waving
turquoise mittens extantly. I must polish
my speech, having spent a life
watching old Steffi Duna movies, and being warned
about the consequences. It seems I should pass;
there's only one essay question, and it can be about anything
you like. Yet I hesitate, like a spermatozoid
that's lost its way and doesn't dare ask directions--
they'd club it if it did. Once you're en route
it doesn't matter if you konw, besides, anyway.
Conversely the winter circuit closes down
until some time in spring, but more likely forever.
Signs of rot and corruption are everywhere
and are even copied by the fashion-conscious.
I must sugar my hair. And my factotum?
You said there was one more in your party.
No one is in a hurry.
Suddenly the day is crocus-sweet.
Anxiety and Hardwood Floors
Only a breath of this region
spindles me off and growing, yes, again.
How fine to be late in the season
where the hopeless hide their fetters
in chains of golden hair. Its air
wants nothing to do with any of us. Yet if I am
the strong man at the post office, as the clock's nine
o'clock tells me I am, why it will go better for the all
of us in here. This living
room he taunts me with. But everybody can see the
sun, abashed and unashamed, pummeling through the rusted
curtains. Pass me that box of gin,
will you?
Young People
Slowly he is eating the stars--
they are like the spines of books to him,
but don't throw two ladies or locations at him.
He called this Nomad's Land.
Yet it was clean and serious. Not, it is true,
cheerful. Not by any means. Yet the old men
in pajamas made a leisurely appearance.
Good times were on the phonograph.
Surely somebody can be his wife,
surely there are strong husbands for such women,
who keep a rifle in the broom closet
and never ask for i.d. Their colors:
those of a saffron strand at evening
in disappointed August. We rise with the swifts,
never to know what cut us loose.